Carrier Pigeon Code From World War 2 Era Stumps English Spy Agency

A carrier pigeon's last wartime message has baffled the code breakers at Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the spy agency in charge of signals intelligence.

The message consists of 27 handwritten blocks of five letters each, Phys.org reports. The note was attached to a pigeon whose skeletal remains were recently found by retired probation officer David Martin while doing work on his house in Surrey, England.

Despite recent advances in cryptography, the simple message may prove indecipherable without the accompanying codebook that presumably would have been in the possession of the message's intended recipient, which is listed only as "X02" on the document.

"This means that without access to the relevant codebooks and details of any additional encryption used, it will remain impossible to decrypt," said a GCHQ spokesman, according to Yahoo!

Stymied so far, the GCHQ has enlisted the Pigeon Museum at Bletchy Park--where mathematician Alan Turing famously helped crack German codes during the war--to trace the pigeon's identity. It is also seeking help from anyone who has information on the note's author, which is rendered in the coded message “Sjt W Stot”, or its presumed recipient, ABC reports.

"We have had about 50 people getting in touch since our request for help was published yesterday, mainly by email but also some phone calls," a GCHQ representative told the paper.

"They have been of varying ages, from school kids to people who were alive in the war. There have been men and women, and not just from the UK - from Holland and the USA too. They're approaching it from different angles, but no one has come through with a solution, saying this is what it definitely means, so the quest continues. It's still early days," the rep added.